are the stars so different in different skies?
by collapsedstars
Summary: Rose dies on a snowy day.


****I.

Rose dies on a snowy day.

A few weeks before she's dead, she tells her husband to wheel her out into the garden. She sits before John's grave, remembering.

Her second husband watches and tries not to sigh. If there's one thing the Doctor never knew about humans, it's their uncanny ability to sense Death.

She talks to John, and she talks to the Doctor.

She tells the lost man of her children, the two she's lost and the one who's alive today, as the writer of fantastic stories about man lost in time and space, roaming forever between the stars.

He's published another book, you see, and it's about a strange man who cannot die. He lives forever, in a time that is not his. People think it's a story about one man, a military captain, but years and years from now, in this strange and different universe, scholars will view it as the same story as the one he published years before.

The dedication reads:_ To my mother's doctors._

That too will be discussed in lecture halls to come.

II.

No one notices the man in the tweed suit in the back row.

He sits like he belongs, as hungover and gloomy as any uni student coming back to school on a Monday. There's still some vodka on his breath, from the funeral the day before.

The professor begins with a photograph. And suddenly, there's blonde hair that's graying slightly at the edges, and a square jaw that's forming laugh lines.

It's Rose, sitting next to a tall boy with gravity-defying hair. She looks slightly annoyed and amused all at once, the same face she always made whenever he recited the entire history and geological composition of a new planet in ten minutes flat.

"This portrait was taken by Rose Tyler's first husband, John Smith, shortly before his car accident in 2028. She is shown here with their son, Pete Smith, while he was still in secondary school. It's been known through the web logs Smith left to his friend in Salisbury that though his mother was devastated by the death, she rarely mentioned her first husband again."

The man in the back row watches as the pictures flick by.

Rose with Pete as an infant. John with Sarah Jane, their second child, who was classified as MIA upon her disappearance in deep space.

Rose pregnant. Rose on her wedding day. Rose, near death.

Upon the second series of pictures, this one showing Pete Smith's transformation into a brilliant novelist, the man leaves. He crashes through the aisle, knocking over smart-boards, laptops, juice bottles, and even the ginger four seats down.

He doesn't apologize.

III.

_Rose_

_In Memoriam_

_By Pete Smith_

Everyone knows of Death. They know the hidden skeleton in the shadow cloak, holding a scythe and beckoning you with one frosting finger. They know of the rips the scythe makes into souls, the canvas where humans paint themselves. They know how these paintings become ruined beyond repair.

They know of Hades, of the Devil, of God.

But not everyone knows of death.

Death is not always a reaper. Sometimes, it is simply a finish to one human's painting, with a final flourish. And recently, one work of art called Rose Tyler was completed, in the quiet suburbs of Cardiff.

Rose Tyler was the Bad Wolf. She worked for a shadowy corporation, a quiet branch of the government. This division was called Torchwood, and through it, this woman rose to her career as the celebrated director. She suffered losses that even today, no one knows much about. And yet, it is for this career that she is most remembered, a career that took away some of the people she loved most.

Is this the irony of a path? Life was depicted to be beautiful to my mother, but in achieving it, she lost her breath.

Rose Tyler was a lover. She loved achingly and ferociously. She loved the whole Earth, and worked until her death to defend it. However, one woman's love may not save the entire universe. So while she did her duty to save the world, she could not save her husband, her children, or her companions. When the world was finally rescued, she retreated.

My father's accident, my sister's mission, and my brother's loss at birth.

These are the ghosts that haunted the woman who was a lover, and the ghosts that remained a promise for her, the rewards for the completion of her masterpiece.

Rose Tyler was human. She loved East Enders, chocolate ice cream, and Paris. Always, always telling my father, "Allonsy!" and he would grin back at her like it was their secret. It was the human who told my mother to stop aching, to stop pretending that her heart had not healed. It was the human who loved and lived and breathed again.

It was her secret, sometimes, that while the Bad Wolf was Rose Tyler, Rose Tyler was not the Bad Wolf.

There once was a woman who was born in a different universe. She was a being of translucent starlight, who carried timelines and planetary movements and the sound of the rotation of asteroids. And yet, she was also a plant, a flower. She was a sprout of the Earth, and with the end, the final remnants of stardust left Rose Tyler.

She is now returned.

IV.

There's a quiet sort of stillness down the hallway, and he hears it ringing in his footsteps and the white-washed walls caving in around him.

Finally, at the end, there's a door that's so full of silence that the ringing, upon seeing its opponent, flees.

He opens it.

Rose Tyler is almost gone, but her eyes are bright and her mind is perfectly, wonderfully clear. It's the pureness of a mountaintop in 15th century China and frozen droplets of white candle wax, perfectly formed as a circle.

He doesn't know if it's the snow piling outside, or the bright, glaring fluorescent lights overhead, but Rose Tyler— the pink and yellow girl, the girl who inhaled the TARDIS and wore Union Jack–upon her death, is white.

"Hello, Doctor."

He smiles back, adjusting to his lab coat. There's a clipboard and a pen, and he doesn't understand anything written on it. But he takes it and holds it and lies.

"Ms. Tyler, you look beautiful today."

She reaches out a careless hand, and a familiar laugh emerges. It scares him a little, because this Rose Tyler, who is not his Rose Tyler, is laughing like he remembers.

"You're a liar. But you look handsome enough today, Doctor. Even your chin seems smaller."

It was a tiny gesture, but she's noticed it. And he does it again, a slight smoothing of the little wrinkles at the end of his chin.

And then her hand, a hand that's still surprisingly strong, grasps his collar. His hand drops to his side as she straightens out his bowtie, and smiles.

"Rose Tyler."

The name leaves his mouth with a small taste, like the end of a sunset, or the beginnings of a rainfall. He looks down, and she's closed her eyes.

And with the taste of her name fresh, he tells her.

It was the three words he couldn't say.

And she knows and she breathes in the words and Rose Tyler, simply just Rose Tyler, dies on a snowy day.


End file.
